Writing for male characters often brings out the self-conscious strain in Dark's voice, whereas her writing about women moves far more organically.
Olds is highly conscious of the strain that her work can put on the people who appear in it.
Perhaps conscious of this strain in her make-up, she always said that her own favourite among Sondheim's songs was The Ladies Who Lunch, from Company (1970).
The general told the troops that he would appear before Congress "conscious of the strain on our forces, the sacrifices that you and your families are making, the gains we have made in Iraq, the challenges that remain, and the importance of building on what we and our Iraqi counterparts have fought so hard to achieve".
We Brits like to pretend we are not much good at art, perhaps being too self-conscious, but a merciful strain of absolutely transcendental beauty can occasionally break out of our restricted souls.
To our knowledge, this is the first study to describe gender differences in heart rate in genetically homogenous strains of conscious mice.
We are fully conscious that the NOD mouse strain has some immunological differences compared to human T1D.
And thematically these peculiarities work as the outward manifestations of a jittery, creative, un-self-conscious intellect operating under the strain of relentless emergency.
Yes, he'd published two books that failed to shake the world - eager, studious-young-man's fiction with a strain of self-conscious experimentalism - and taken off to India nursing the faltering seeds of another.
A franchise of Ligne Roset, the high-end French design house, created and owns the establishment, and the space is a study in a particularly Gallic strain of self-conscious sophistication.
Whether these phenotypic differences in lab strains are driven by conscious selection, inadvertent selection, a relaxation in selection, or are simply the fixation of deleterious mutations, is not known.
